War Photographer: Memento Mori
by slightlysmall
Summary: Colin Creevey didn't sneak into the Battle of Hogwarts alone. His little brother came with him, only fifteen years old, and he was carrying a camera. Won Fan-Favourite for the November 2012 One-Shot Awards.


**A/N: This is written for the Poemfic Competition on the HPFC forum. The poem excerpts that bookend this one-shot are from Carol Ann Duffy's "War Photographer" and I do not own the rights to it. The characters within the one-shot belong to J.K. Rowling, and I am not her, either. I recommend looking up the translation for the Latin phrase I use if you aren't sure what it means.**

_In his darkroom he is finally alone  
__with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.  
__The only light is red and softly glows,  
__as though this were a church and he  
__a priest preparing to intone a mass._

Colin Creevey didn't sneak into the Battle of Hogwarts alone. His little brother came with him, only fifteen years old, and he was carrying a camera. He stayed out of the action, hidden behind statues which sometimes fell back upon him after the impact of a misdirected curse. When that happened, it was all he could do to keep from crying out, to mutter a quick healing spell against his bleeding flesh and once again pick up the camera. He knew he couldn't be caught; to be caught would mean to be taken out of the action, and the action was precisely where a photographer belonged.

So he crept where he could, shooting pictures of Death Eaters masked and unmasked as they fought against professors, parents, children. He shot the wounded, their faces twisted up in pain, and he captured the living attending to the dead bodies that used to hold the souls of friends and relatives. The mourning on their faces was harder to capture than the raw pain of the injured, but still his own face remained solemn and unaffected.

The flash of his camera went unnoticed among the light from curses. As he carefully wound up one roll of film and inserted another, he was glad that Colin had stopped him before they left their safe house to answer Neville's call. "If you're bringing the camera, you're going to need every spare roll we have," Colin had said, shoving dozens of cartridges into his hand. Now, on the battlefield, he was on roll number eighteen and it wasn't yet dawn.

He had to stop shooting when, through the lens of his brother's camera, he saw Colin lying lifeless on the grass. Even at night - even in death - he was unmistakable. The camera bounced against his chest, carried along only by virtue of the strap holding it around his neck. It felt like a noose, and he wished it would strangle him. The weight of his brother's camera pounding against his own beating heart was too much and it was all he could do to ignore it as he sprinted up to Gryffindor tower.

The Fat Lady took one long look at him as he reached the entrance, said, "Oh. It's you," and revealed the passageway. It was only once he was inside the Common Room that he wondered what he would have done to get in after a year away. He ran up the flight of stairs to the dormitory but stopped two flights before his own room. Instead, he collapsed on his brother's bed and, for the first time in years, began to cry.

It took him a week to gain the courage to begin to develop his twenty-one rolls of film, but once he began, it was with a solemn ritual that reminded him of the Catholic church services of his youth. In the faint red glow of the Hogwarts darkroom, he mixed chemicals and potions in silence, his hands preparing the roll of film in a black bag by muscle memory. His mind was still numb.

"_Tempus fugit, memento mori,_" he repeated to himself as he slowly began to select photographs to enlarge. He said it like he was at Mass - and perhaps that is where he first heard it - but he wasn't sure, and couldn't remember exactly what it meant. Regardless, it seemed appropriate, and he repeated it with every face that appeared on a newly developed photograph.

He stopped using magical solution when he came to the photographs of the dead. It was bad enough to see a motionless picture of someone whose face was contorted with grief or lying prostrate over the body of someone they had loved. To live it out - to see them rocking back and forth beside a body that lay still even in a moving picture - was too much.

When he got to that last picture, that one involuntarily snapped as his whole body clenched in shock at the sight of his brother, he hesitated on whether or not to develop it. After a moment, it seemed to be best to have it, one last memento of the person that had been his brother.

He knew where the pictures were going, and didn't really want to send them. But what choice did he have? What use were these pictures if there was no one to see what had happened, what devastation the war had caused? So he chose a few dozen pictures - some magical, some Muggle - and packed them carefully into an envelope addressed to the Daily Prophet. Inside the school Owlery, he quickly composed a note:

"Photographs taken at the Battle of Hogwarts by an anonymous war photographer."

_Something is happening. A stranger's features  
__faintly start to twist before his eyes,  
__a half formed ghost. He remembers the cries  
__of this man's wife, how he sought approval  
__without words to do what someone must  
__and how the blood stained into foreign dust.  
__A hundred agonies in black-and-white  
__from which his editor will pick out five or six  
__for Sunday's supplement._


End file.
